Read Before You React

Mabel is amazing. I love her.

There. That’s it.

(Not really).

Readers, sometimes in my attempts to care for Mabel and protect this precious monarch caterpillar from harm (only 2-10% make it to butterfly adulthood, after all), I’ve actually harmed when I’ve wanted to help. You see, I didn’t do a lot of research about caterpillars beforehand, so some of the natural parts of her lifecycle … I interpreted as distress.

When I came outside to discover her on the patio, far away from her pot of milkweed sustenance, I assumed she had fallen, lost her way, and was desperately trying to use her horrific sense of sight to find her way back home. Thus, I picked her up, placed her back on the leaves, and rescued her.

But she wandered off the leaf again!

And again!

And again!

Why was she persistently rejecting her food source?

Well, what I interpreted to be a hopeless affliction of misbalance and navigational failure turned out to be her God-given instinct at work. After days of practically nonstop eating, she was ready to find a safe space to make her chrysalis and turn into a butterfly!

This wandering phenomenon is completely normal, and my desire to help actually inhibited her desire to complete her quest.

Thus, this blog is about reading—probably not reading caterpillar articles, as I did, but studying, observing, thinking rationally—before taking action.

Oftentimes, we are quick to react based on our gut feelings and first impressions, when really, the Bible tells us that haste makes waste (I’m paraphrasing Proverbs 21:5, NIV, here). It’s wise to pause, ponder, and pray before jumping to conclusions about things, so let’s try to do that, okay?

When we notice those all-too-familiar alarm bells clanging in our heads, we can acknowledge them, remember that our emotions don’t have to control us, and let those uncomfortable clangs persist while we persist in not frantically responding to them.

Here’s an example:

A lot of times, when I’m listening to a sermon or a friend and hear a statement about the Bible or faith or Jesus that seems to contradict what I believe, I instantly get freaked out.

On the inside, my mental alarm bells are blaring and the OCD thoughts are incessantly repeating something along the lines of if you’re wrong about this, you’re wrong about everything and it’s all a lie and you have no One to put your hope in, yet the Lord’s helped me through these situations often enough that I know not to take my thoughts seriously.

When I was younger and first beginning to experience OCD (my anxiety levels skyrocketed when I went to college), I’d get an observe fear thought like this and, in a panic, try to Google my way to answers that would ease my angst. Figuring it out, either through research or thinking over and over until I found a (never existing) solution, was my compulsive act that kept me stuck in an OCD cycle, since I’d never fully understand God and therefore never fully get answers to whatever questions were plaguing me.

However, over time, the Lord taught me that it’s only when I pause, stop scrambling for answers, and let myself stay in the uncomfortable yet harmless state of obsessive uncertainty, that the vicious fear cycle is broken.

That’s what I do now (or try to do, at least. I fall into a spirit of fear and obsession a lot, but God’s grace abounds).

More often than not, the alarm bells fade after a few minutes. And if the question I have is still hovering in my mind after a few hours or days, I wait to research it until I’m no longer in a state of fear. That way, I can try to gain Biblical and theological understanding, but only for the sake of drawing closer to the Lord’s Truth, not for frantically racing to relieve an ache that only He can soothe.

This idea helps with a lot of my compulsions, truth be told; I obsess over schedules/planning, which is why I have a screen timer to limit the usage of my calendar, email, and messaging apps. Similarly, thanks to the fact that levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) peak soon after waking, I try to spend five minutes breathing slowly and deeply in order to dissuade my morning urge to rush rush rush in a blind panic. As for my socially anxious tendency to numb out with Netflix, food, or doom scrolling after an event, I’m attempting to sit with the Lord and let my uncomfy I bet they hate me now and why did I say that? thoughts brush over me like a harmless little wave.

Because truly, our fears only confine, consume, and control us if we decide that they’re a tsunami-sized foe.

So yeah. That’s it: stop and think before you plow ahead in a panic. Be like Mabel—pausing and analyzing to see if you’ve found a sturdy, trustworthy place for your thoughts (or her chrysalis, as it were) to dwell—and not like Maddie—freaking out about rescuing a caterpillar who was never, ever lost.

I love this caterpillar and Jesus and random ocean analogies and all the things He’s teaching us through His precious creation!